Facebook Publishes Latest Community Standards Report
Facebook Publishes Latest Community Standards Report
Facebook's VP of Integrity, Guy Rosen, on Wednesday, published their latest Community Standards Enforcement Report for the second quarter of 2021. The report covers the latest in their policy enforcement on hate speech and changes in ranking in the News Feed.
Misinformation
The report shows some interesting details related to the misinformation of COVID-19 being spread on the platform, as well as some advancements in Facebook's detection systems. Facebook is stating "we are committed to helping people get authoritative information, including vaccine information."
"We removed more than 20 million pieces of content from Facebook and Instagram globally for violating our policies on COVID-19-related misinformation."
"We have removed over 3,000 accounts, pages, and groups for repeatedly violating our rules against spreading COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation."
"We displayed warnings on more than 190 million pieces of COVID-related content on Facebook that our third-party fact-checking partners rated as false, partly false, altered or missing context, collaborating with 80 fact-checking organizations in more than 60 languages around the world. When they rate a piece of content with one of these ratings, we add a prominent label warning people before they share it and show it lower in people’s feed."
Facebook's size and reach have a massive impact on information, globally, in both a positive and negative stance. Just as a stat, "190 million pieces of COVID-related content" is a staggering number. A label on the content may or may not sway opinion on the continued increase of Delta-variant cases increasing.
Hate Speech Enforcement
Facebook is focusing efforts on removing hate speech, with slow, but steady success.
"Prevalence of hate speech on Facebook continued to decrease for the third quarter in a row. In Q2, it was 0.05%, or 5 views per 10,000 views, down from 0.05-0.06%, or 5 to 6 views per 10,000 views in Q1."
5 views, or 0.05%, out of every 10,000 means that a lot of content is being missed by Facebook's systems, but it's getting slightly better vs Q1 views of 5-6 per 10,000 views or 0.05-0.06, and 0.07-0.08% in Q4 of 2020.
"We removed 31.5 million pieces of hate speech content from Facebook, compared to 25.2 million in Q1, and 9.8 million from Instagram, up from 6.3 million in Q1. This is due to continued improvement in our proactive detection."
These trends show that Facebook is working towards actively improving the platform to help slow the spread of misinformation and hate speech, but it's a long road and will probably never be completely cleaned.
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Mark E. Chiles is the Founder of Overwrite Media and has an extensive two-decade career in progressive technology and digital media. He's been a speaker at several conferences related to digital marketing, media, and customer data. Connect with him on Twitter @markechiles or on LinkedIn.